Posts Tagged ‘The Guardian’

“[W]ho really needs credibility, a sense of shame or any degree of self-respect when you’re working for Trump?

“Speaking to Fox News after the Mueller report destroyed what was left of her reputation, [Sarah] Sanders worked her way through a few more fabrications. ‘Look, I acknowledged that I had a slip of the tongue when I used the word ‘countless’, but it’s not untrue,’ she said.

“That is some World Cup-quality lying. The single sentence includes at least three lies and there are only 21 words in it: an average of one lie for every seven words.

“There was no acknowledgement of a slip of the tongue (lie No 1). It was no slip of the tongue (lie No 2). And she stands by the lie with the weasel words of a double negative about its non-untruthfulness (lie No 3 and quite possibly No 4).

“You don’t get to lie as well as that by chance or amateur skill. It takes dedication and effort . . .”

“I don’t like Amazon, and I don’t like Donald Trump either. I would approve enthusiastically if a president started enforcing antitrust laws, but that’s not what Trump is proposing to do. What we are being offered instead is a choice between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country. And, eagerly, we are lining up with one or the other.

“This in turn seems to me an almost perfect representation of the wretched choices available to Americans these days, as well as the megadoses of self-deception we are swallowing in order to make them. It is everything that is wrong with our politics, and it extends from the most sweeping matters of state right down to the individual reader.

“. . . [T]his [is] where we are now in the world’s greatest democracy. We have the billionaire Republicans, with their bigotry and their war on all things public, and the billionaire Democrats, with their oblivious ideology of globe and technology. To the common people, assembled in all our majesty, the momentous question is posed: who do you hate more?”

(U.S. readers might not be aware of this, but The Guardian[formerly The Manchester Guardian] is the single best news source on the Internet, including sources hidden behind a paywall [e.g., New York Times or Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post]; The Guardian is the best source, period. I like them enough that I occasionally contribute money to them. The only other news outlet that I would unreservedly recommend is The Intercept, which due to lesser financial resources posts fewer stories than The Guardian, but whose journalism is arguably of even higher quality. For opinion mixed with news, you won’t do better than Truthdig.)

Barbara Ehrenreich has a great new piece in The Guardian, “Let’s call the pro-lifers what they are: pro-death.”

It’s good to see someone else — Ehrenreich, one of the most astute observers of the contemporary American political and social scene — point this out.

Here’s the definition of “pro-life” that we first published in 1992 in the original edition of The American Heretic’s Dictionary:

PRO-LIFE, adj. Pro-death (of political opponents, abortion providers, and women, through back-alley abortions); 2) Vitally concerned with the well-being of “babies” right up to the moment of their birth — at which time they become “welfare cases” undeserving of such luxuries as housing, health care, adequate nutrition, and a decent education. This has led some unsympathetic observers to conclude that the interest of “pro-lifers” in the welfare of “babies” is purely hypocritical, and that they are, in fact, motivated by misogyny and anti-sexual “moral” hysteria — that their true interest is in causing as much misery as possible to sexually active women by forcing them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

This, however, is not the case. If “pro-lifers” truly lacked concern about the welfare of the unwanted babies born as the result of “pro-life” policies, they wouldn’t be so willing — in fact, so eager — to have taxpayers shoulder the crushing costs of building the prisons necessary to house those “babies” later in their lives.

(A note regarding Repo Man: Writer/Director Alex Cox named some of the characters after popular brands of beer. In the photo above, Harry Dean Stanton, as “Bud,” is flanked on his left by Tracey Walter as “Miller” and Sy Richardson as “Lite.”)

Like this:

This morning’s Guardian reports that a prankster calling himself @SINON_REBORN successfully impersonated recently fired Trump toady Reince Priebus in a series of e-mails with former White House communications director and low-budget Goodfellas understudy Anthony Scaramucci. The best excerpt from the @SINON_RENORN e-mails to Scaramucci is this:

“Personally, I’d get rid of dumb and dumber, the Trump sons. Seeing them pose with various bits of animal they’ve shot is the biggest overcompensation for underdeveloped testicles I’ve ever had the misfortune to see.

“If they fell into a barrel of tits, they’d still come out sucking each other’s thumb.”

And with that, we’ll say, “Adios Mooch! And Reince! Don’t let the door hit your asses on the way out!”

As anyone in his or her right mind would agree, you can’t trust the New York Times — not after their role in selling G.W. Bush’s Iraq invasion — nor the even further-right Washington Post, especially after Satan’s little brother (Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) took it over recently. So, what’s left?

A lot. I typically look at a good half-dozen news and/or compilation sites every day or two: